necessary sacrifices

[swan_tower]

I've started over on "And Blow Them at the Moon." As much as I like the opening scene I'd written, it just doesn't fit the story; it introduces an additional pov (a bad decision, if I want to keep this thing short) and the tone is too light-hearted. This is not, I fear, going to be a light-hearted story. Not given what happened to Father Garnet, and to the conspirators, in the end.

(Man, reading about the Gunpowder Plot is depressing. Especially Sir Everard Digby. Talk about a waste.)

So that's 614 words of a new start, and already I think it's better. Father Garnet praying in Thames Street, and Magrat confronting the fact that she is displaying conduct unbecoming to a church grim. I need to find a way to say more about him, but maybe that will fit into a later scene.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

It's a grim period all together: while I love the 17th century in general, the Stuarts are just... There is something grindingly relentless about their errors.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

In part, I find myself fundamentally unable to grok how people could feel so passionately on the issue of religion as to risk their lives and die, or commit horrible atrocities on their fellow man, over such points. Where it becomes political, yes: witness the question of where a Catholic's allegiance lies, with the King or the Pope. But a lot of it goes beyond that foundation, and I just . . . don't get it.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I do get the religious thing -- partly, I suspect, down to reading La Reine Margot at an impressionable age. It's the blindness of the decision making that gets to me: how could James I and Charles I remain so relentlessly inept and ill-advised? I want to shake them.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I haven't read as much about James I, but I don't get the impression he should be tarred with the brush of ineptitude. The things I've read give me the impression he was a much savvier politician than his son (not that that's a high bar to clear), successfully keeping the Papacy at arm's length without ever provoking them into excommunicating him, and brokering lots of stuff wrt to European events. Arrogant, yes, and probably ill-advised on occasion, but not nearly the extent that Charles was.

And in the context of this particular event, James isn't the one I want to shake. It's Catesby and all the others. I understand they were persecuted, I understand their patience was at an end, but still. Inept they weren't, but they advised themselves very ill indeed.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I think with James the issue is the favourites and the obsessions, but yes, he was more able than Charles.
And the Plotters were equally careless.